Product and Process Architecture

Description:

It is not enough to know the market and the products that are offered in the market. It has become important to know the architecture of the products and services offered by the enterprise. Product and service architectures have a structure that can be analyzed for efficiencies and opportunities, such as: clustering parts of a product or service into platforms. These platforms are then supported by the process architecture.

This course presents a methodology, artifacts and possible tools for developing and analyzing product, service and process architectures. Specific techniques of semantic analysis are used to compare and contrast the architectures, determine where common points are and identify opportunities for consolidation into platforms or separation into individual product lines. Further the techniques can be used for comparing and contrasting structures for potential mergers, acquisition or consolidations.

Duration: 4 days

Business Architecture for Managers

Description:

Today’s managers must have a basic awareness and understanding of the concept of business architecture. Managing the structure of an organization and determining the risk and impact associated with change is a part of every mangers toolbox.

This course presents an overview of business architecture and its value in just one day. All the basic components are described and how they relate to each other. The value proposition for architecture revolves around the use of cost benefit analysis and basic SWOT analysis of the architecture need. The course covers the definition of architecture, describes the suite of architectures used in business analysis, the uses of architecture and the value are explained in simple easy terms.

Duration: 1 day

Business Architecture (the Tier Approach)

Description:

To compete today a business must be agile and adaptable. Organizations especially large entities such as governments, global enterprises, large non-profits and educational institutions have a need to understand their structure. Understanding the structure of an organization today means understanding all the relationship between the various components of the organization or business. The key approach to this understanding is the development and use of business architecture.

The interoperability of organizational components depends on how well the architecture is known and documented. In the past, this depended on the corporate knowledge in people’s heads. The economic situation today has pressured organizations to merge operations, consolidate, divest and re-arrange their basic components. Loss of staff also means loss of knowledge of how the organization works. Assessing impact of changes depends on the preparation of models used to describe the organization and the analytics available to conduct an assessment of changes. A lack of architecture documentation means that re-structuring decisions are made with limited knowledge of the impact of change and therefore have greater uncertainty for success.

The business architecture includes the:

product architecture,

process architecture for delivery of products or services and

the enabler architectures to make the processes efficient and effective.

The largest of these, the Information Technology (IT) architecture, is critical to the effective operation of the business. IT has a common set of technology components that interact with the business to enable processes. Processes in turn support the products and services. Changes in either organization direction or IT architecture can therefore impact the enterprise in both positive and negative ways.